Samadhi, the forgotten twin sister of mindfulness practice, is a meditation approach that focuses on spaciousness and steadiness. In this world where media memes of fear, xenophobia, paranoia and envy seem to be becoming more and more inescapable, having some sense of the gaps and space in between the barrage of stimuli is life-saving.

Samadhi trains our brain to place our attention where we want it to go, rather than where newspaper moguls, social media billionaires, Silicon valley entrepreneurs or the behemoths of big business want it to go.

In the ridiculous speediness of our minds, whipped up to match the ridiculous speediness of the online, media-driven world, Samadhi slows everything down to a human pace where we can see what is really happening to us.

Samadhi grounds us in the simple, slow realities of the human body. And particularly in the sense of inner spaciousness within the body and a vastly expanded sense of space outside the body. There’s great sanity in this.

When practiced regularly, Samadhi can lead us to states of spacious relaxation that our currently cramped minds have no conception of. The Buddhist used it as the blissful fuel for all other practices.

The simple steadiness of a Samadhi-flavoured life becomes intensely satisfying. The high-sugar, flavour-enhanced, super-stimulated fare of the consumer world lose all their savour in comparison.

Cultivating a steady, spacious sense of who we really are dispels the clouds of invidious envy and competition that riddle our contemporary lives. With regular Samadhi, we come to like our selves. Comparisons don’t need to happen.

Fully tanked on the daily fuel of Samadhi, we move through the world in an energised way, much less inclined to give away our peace of mind to every advert, TV show, newspaper or politician.

Samadhi puts our awareness into the space around our thoughts and, over time, we become less and less mesmerised by every random thought-stream that pops into our mind. We can chose to respond rather than react to every passing stimuli.

In an age when anxiety is whipped up into fear of others, and xenophobia becomes an acceptable way of acting out our insecurities, Samadhi offers a calmer, steadier way of being with our own experience. Rather than obsessing with our emotions, we have the space and calmness to feel them properly and process them as our own.